In a sense, housing suffers from the same identity crisis that bitcoin does. Because so many homes are now being bought for investment purposes and not by resident homeowners, housing has become speculative and the historical slow-but-steady growth in prices has been replaced by a boom-and-bust cycle typical of speculative markets. Just as bitcoin can never become a useful currency as long as speculators dominate its trade, neither can the housing market go back to being the stable economic foundation it once was for the same reason.